Names of roads in Cantonment area lead to colonial heroes, post-Independence stalwarts

PUNE: A car driver looking for Maneckji Mehta Road in Pune could find it only after he gave an autorickshaw driver its old name of Staunton Road.

Like Chhatrapati Shivaji Terminus is still VT in local parlance, decades of renaming has quite some way to go in Pune, before Staunton Road becomes Maneckji Mehta Road to all. It was named to remember Francis Staunton, a British captain, who led the troops in the Battle of Koregaon Bhima where the Marathas were defeated.

Roads in the Cantonment area, like the area’s nature, had been laid out by the British East India Company and subsequently the British Army in a grid-like fashion, with almost military precision. Roads turn at right angles, and modifications are appropriate at places where artillery and soldiers were supposed to be stationed.

Initially, and even till now, the names of these roads are almost reflective of the way they were built, and often of some British nostalgia. The Right Flank Lines in Wanowrie have remained so ever since the Cantonment was established. And though the stretch in front of The Bishop’s School in named Shaheed Bhagat Singh Road, authorities have had to still place the street’s original name- Staveley Road- on road furniture, Staveley being the name of a village in the historic Cumbria county in England.

The British fought some bloody battles against the Marathas and Peshwas to gain a foothold in the region, and they did not forget to cement the legacy of two of the most important men in that operation.

A Scotsman from Dumbarton, Mountstuart Elphinstone was one of the first, as the British resident in the Peshwa court, to realise that the nature of politics in the area had left the Peshwas weak. And when the Marathas declared war on the British in 1817 and met on the battlefields of present-day Khadki, Elphinstone secured a decisive victory for the British troops and annexed Peshwa lands. He would later become the Governor of Bombay.

His legacy was secured by the British through the famous Elphinstone College in Mumbai, and also through a stretch of road in the Cantonment which separates the civil area from the military one. These days, however, the Elphinstone Road, which starts from the Maratha War Memorial, has been renamed after Banoo Jehangir Coyaji, the pioneering physician and former head of the KEM Hospital.

A couple of decades after Elphinstone, an Englishman of royal blood, Charles Napier, a veteran of wars against Napoleon in the Iberian peninsula (present-day Spain), was asked to take command of the Army in the Bombay Presidency in Pune, which was used as a base for the bloody Anglo-Afghan Wars.

Napier, ever the maverick military man, went beyond his orders and captured the whole of Sindh for the Company. He would later be appointed governor of the Bombay Presidency, but left in disgust after numerous disputes with Lord Dalhousie, the head of the East India Company.

His legacy in the Cantonment still stands, though. On the authorities’ books, the road from Pulgate to Wanowrie still reads Napier Road.

In the civil areas, life used to be somewhat easier when it comes to street names. Till sometime after independence, the bustling commercial streets, the three of them running parallel to each other, were named East Street, Central Street, and West Street.

Over the past few decades, East Street was renamed after General KS Thimayya, who was in effect the seventh chief of the Indian Army. Central Street became the iconic Mahatma Gandhi Road. As for West Street, part of it was named Gaffarbeg Street, and after the Hazrat Babajan shrine, is now Jan Mohammad Street.

But a look at shop signs and marble plaques on houses shows that the new street names have not completely rubbed off on locals.

“I am an old person and for me my home will always be West Street. I came to know of this street’s new name only a decade or so ago when a postman brought me a letter from a bank. Even though I am a Camp person through and through, whenever someone asks me for directions using these new names, I am always a bit lost,” scrap dealer Asif Shaikh said.
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